I just got back to Miami Beach from NYC. The streets, the restaurants, the theaters. the cabarets houses, the museums, the art galleries, and the event venues are all filled with people. The city is totally vibrant. The only place where ghosts are dancing 24/7 are in the thousands of offices that are still empty, and probably will be for a long time. I just can’t imagine what it’s like having to pay for office space that is not being used. It used to cost us over $25,000 a month in rent for our PR agency.
We did that for 25 years. I get the heebie-jeebies when I think about the money we had to generate just to cover our overhead. For many companies that amount of money is small change compared to what they have to spend to keep their office lights on. Look at the space ship building Apple built. It was the dream office building Steve Jobs always wanted. Now it’s practically an empty shell.
As time goes on, more and more folks will return to the office just to get out of their homes. However, it took Covid-19 to make us all aware of the joys of working remotely. This is a concept that many of us will worship forever
Only 28% of New York office workers are back in the office
Only 28% of Manhattan office workers are back at their desks and fewer than half will be back by January, according to a new survey.
Employers expect that 49% of office workers will return on an average weekday by January, according to a survey of 188 big employers in Manhattan by the Partnership for New York City.
More than a third of employers expect their office space needs in Manhattan will decline over the next five years, according to the poll.
Continued weakness in the office sector could prove costly for New York City’s budget, as it means a loss in property taxes.
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According to the survey, more than a third of employers expect their office space needs in Manhattan will decline over the next five years, and 13% expect a reduction in their New York City workforce.
“Post-pandemic, remote work is here to stay,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s leading business group. “There is going to be a permanent relook at keeping offices and jobs in New York City.”
Office vacancy rates in New York City are now at a 30-year high of 18.6%. The value of the city’s commercial real estate has fallen by $28.6 billion, or 16.6%, reducing property tax revenue by up to $1.7 billion this fiscal year, according to a recent report from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Property taxes are the largest source of revenue for New York City, and commercial property is the largest source of property taxes, so continued weakness in the office sector could prove costly for the city’s budget.
While commercial real estate landlords and developers say leasing activity is strong and workers will return to the office, many employers say the city’s high taxes, long commutes and high costs could prolong any recovery in the commercial sector.
By January, only 13% of Manhattan office workers are expected to be in the workplace five days per week, according to the survey. A third will be in three days per week, 15% will be in two days per week, 7% will be in one day per week and 21% will still be fully remote.
The industry with the highest expected average daily attendance in January will be real estate (80%) followed by law firms (61%) and financial services (47%). The industries with the lowest expected attendance in January will be accounting (36%), consulting (30%) and tech (24%).
Wylde said that in addition to workers staying remote, the city is grappling with high-earning business owners and financial partners leaving New York for tax reasons and taking their companies and workforce with them.
“The danger is that when the high earners leave, they take operations with them,” Wylde said. “So we hear now of operations in asset management and other areas, not just individual high earners, but the real business operations moving to Texas, to Tennessee, to Florida.”
Wylde said 22% of financial firms plan to reduce their New York City-based workforce in the next five years — an alarming number, given that financial-services are the economic backbone of New York City.
“What’s going to happen over the next 5 to 10 years in terms of our economic and tax dependence on a population that now knows its highly mobile,” she said.
Meet my client Susan Warner. This is a very unusual assignment. My job is to help her tell her story to the world. We are using broadcast, internet, print, in-person talks, zoom meetings, special appearances, essays, and anything we can think of.
Susan just did an interview with “Passport Mommy” that dives into two subjects that many of us think about all the time but are too skittish to discuss, death and sex. Susan tells us about coping with death and recovering and then the dating and the relationship journey.
Susan Warner is an educator, wife and mother. Unfortunately, she has suffered profound loss with the death of her son and husband six months apart. The catastrophic loss was almost too much to bear. Luckily, Susan shares how she got through it all and what life is like dating at an older age during these times.
Michelle Jerson is the host of the national radio show, “Passport Mommy,” heard on 55 stations with an audience of 3.2 million. It is also a podcast and can be found on your favorite podcasting platform. Passport Mommy is a magazine style talk show that covers topics ranging from travel, wellness, and finance to education and lifestyle. Motherhood is a journey and Michelle aims to bring enlightening guests to her audience to help educate and enrich their lives.
The following story appeared in the Washington Post. This was a frequent topic many of us discussed over the years as we spent many hours of our lives going back and forth to school and then to work. If you want to calculate how many hours of your life you spent commuting, click here.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2021/commute-calculator-pandemic. If you have trouble opening it, let me know.
For many people who have been able to work from home during the pandemic, the prospect of commuting to the office again can feel like a challenge. But fear not: Graphics columnist Sergio Peçanha has developed a handy interactive calculator to help people better understand how much time they spend in transit.
My one-hour commute to and from work each day, for example, adds up to more than 10 full days each year — enough time to watch 150 films, or all of “Squid Game” 30 times. By the end of my career, that might add up to 14 months of my life. Yikes!
But time is just one way to quantify the cost of commuting. As Peçanha points out, transportation is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And the financial costs of office work add up significantly, especially when you include the price of buying lunch or coffee.
In 2019, Americans spent an average of about one hour commuting to and from work each day. That may not have seemed like a big deal before the pandemic, but it has become a hard sell for many who’ve worked from home for more than a year now and learned that the show went on just fine from a distance.
If you are an American with average commute time, you would spend about 250 hours in transit each year — that adds up to more than 10 days. By the end of your career, you might spend nearly a year of life commuting.
If instead of commuting an hour, you used that time learning a language, in one year you would probably be fluent enough to get by in a foreign country. In a lifetime, you could learn multiple languages, become a black beltand a life-of-the-party guitar player.
If you spent the time binge-watching Netflix, one year of commuting would be enough to watch more than 150films.Or all nine episodes of “Squid Game” back to back 30 times.
You could also spend that time with friends, gardening, getting fit, cooking, knitting, sleeping or doomscrolling. Even people who do something pleasant or useful during their commutes could find a more comfortable place to do those same things.
Or, if you’re like me, you could scatter all those activities throughout your days, because you’re too undisciplined to make anything really useful with the time you just found. What you do doesn’t really matter: The point is that the pandemic gave that time back to us. It makes no sense to lose it again.
And time is just one way to quantify what we lose if we revive the commute. There’s also the pollution we produce and the money we squander and the loss of the unmatchable joy that comes with working in our pajamas.
Transportation is the largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the United States, mostly from cars, SUVs and small trucks. The average annual cost of commuting is somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000, depending on where you live. If you spend even $10 more a day on coffee and lunch at work, that adds up to about $2,500 per year (eating at home costs about half that).
As for the pajamas, they are just a metaphor for the small privileges of working from home that add up to quality of life — from keeping up with the laundry to spending more time with people we love and working with our pets nearby.
It is hard to argue that the benefit of commuting more than once a week or so is worth the toll on the planet, on the purse and on your quality of life. I don’t mean that meeting colleagues in person is not useful, sometimes important or even fun. The first time I saw my boss after a year and a half, I hugged him — and I meant it.
But when we used to meet every day there was no hug. What is the point of going back to a life where you don’t regularly hug your boss?
Methodology
Calculations were based on 250 work days per year, 40-hour workweeks, eight-hour workdays and a career length of 40 years. The calculation for full-length feature films was based on 90 minutes run time.
Sources: U.S. Census; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Netflix.
I heard this story a few months ago from my friend Ron Abel but actress/singer Linda Purl told it last night to the audience at Birdland. She and actor Patrick Duffy found love again over Zoom during the pandemic. You can read all about it below.
Our artist client, Allen Hirsch, has accomplished the impossible. He paints on mesh, or any composition made out of strings, to show what it’s like to see the world through a structure like a fence. As an artist, he feels we see surrounding reflections on a fence that we never would have noticed if we just looked at the landscape in front of us.
Allen accomplishes this by placing spots of paint on the strings that make you think he created the painting on the canvas. It’s quite remarkable. Very few artists have the skill to paint this way. Once you see the painting in person, or below, you will still think that it was created on the canvas. It’s a very tricky visual experience.
Why am I writing about this? Until you enter Allen’s world, and hang around for a while, you have no idea how many creative endeavors he has been involved in. I found the string paintings in his SoHo loft a few years ago and it has taken this long to get an assortment of them to show you. Our PR agency represents Allen for his smartphone case inventions. Called HANDL New York, the accessories give you the perfect grip and kickstands for all kinds of important uses. Only an artist like Allen could have figured this out. Read his bio below.
Allen Hirsch is an American painter, writer, inventor, entrepreneur, and New York City developer.
He was born in Encino, California in 1959. He received a B.F.A at Syracuse University, and also attended Camberwell School of Arts in London, Skowhegan School, New York Studio School and received a M.A from Rosary College in Florence, Italy in 1986.
In 1982, he was discovered outside the Whitney Museum exhibiting a begging self portrait by Eugene Mihaesco. He was then asked to do covers for TIME Magazine from between 1983 to 1991.
In 1993, he painted the inaugural portrait of Bill Clinton for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The painting subsequently hung in the White House during his tenure.
He won a Society of Illustrators Award for “Drugs” cover of TIME in 1986 and received the Hitchcock Award for Landscape Painting from the National Academy Museum in 1997.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he painted portrait commissions and self-portraits, exploring the brain’s projection on the right and left sides of the face, painting with left and right hands to express “the duality of the psyche.” He developed a technique “New Cubism” where the image is formed and buried at the same time and invented “String Paintings.”
Allen has also been making digital art since the first Macintosh came out in 1984.
Allen traveled frequently to Venezuela from 1995-2015 and painted the life on the coast of African descendants brought there as slaves in the 18th Century. It was there he rescued Benjamin, an orphaned capuchin monkey and brought him to New York.
A documentary on their life and art together called “Long Live Benjamin” was produced by the New York Times and won an Emmy in 2017.
Painting from life, Allen has documented many of the dramatic events in NYC including 9/11, the Hurricane Sandy blackout, and the COVID 19 shutdown. He also created a series of scores of paintings of his view on Lafayette Street in different lights and seasons.
He has exhibited at Allan Stone Gallery, Louis Stern Fine Arts, Monique Goldstrom Gallery , American Art Gallery, the National Academy Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
Allen has written for the New York Times and other publications. He has several books in development on his art, monkey and a new study on Pieter de Hooch.
In 2013, Allen invented HANDL, a new way to ergonomically hold and stand cellphones based on his experience with hand movement and touch projection in art. HANDL has been used by the world’s top celebrities and athletes and currently in mass retailers in the USA and abroad. Allen has over 30 patents involving cell phone holding apparatus around the world.
Allen purchased an important SoHo retail space in 2003 and conceived of a diner/basement experience that resulted in La Esquina, one of downtown NYC’s most popular nightspots. He also founded The Kaaterskill, currently an inn and wedding venue in upstate New York
My new book project. My client/author is wearing the blue sweater and our publisher is sporting the beard. Look closely. He is the son of a very famous actor. He lives in Woodstock.
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Eliot Hess captured the very red skies over Miami with a blimp floating in the middle of it.
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This is the 39th episode of “What The Heck Is That?” Steve Greenberg’s game show is the star of YouTube. Subscribe and like it. We want you to be a charter member. Very prestigious.
So acceptable then. So unacceptable today. Thank you Michael Sommer for reminding us that we have progressed, even though most days it doesn’t feel like it.
Eliot and I visited the museum last May with 20 other Fountainhead Arts members. At first family and friends asked me what the heck I was doing in Bentonville, Arkansas. This article explains it all.
What’s in the Big Box?
Louise Bourgeois’s Maman spider presides over the courtyard that leads to the south entrance to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It’s a fitting welcome to the 200,000-square-foot museum, in Bentonville, Arkansas, that is Alice Walton’s baby. Nestled on 120 acres of Ozarks forest, where young Walton and her brothers, heirs to the Walmart fortune, would ride horses and hike, the institution will celebrate its 10th anniversary this month and embark upon a vast expansion, both of the museum and of Walton’s philanthropic vision. Within the next year, Walton will oversee the addition of 100,000 square feet of galleries, educational facilities, and event spaces, as well as the construction of a headquarters for her Art Bridges foundation, which seeks to expand access to American art across the nation, and for her Whole Health Institute, an endeavor focused on holistic health and well-being.
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Bourgeois’s arachnid matriarch is fitting in another way, as Walton’s love of art and philanthropy began with her own mother, Helen. Over nearly 50 years of marriage, Helen saw her husband Sam Walton, a farmer’s son, graduate from running a single Ben Franklin five-and-dime franchise to pioneering the concept of discount one-stop shopping. He opened his first Walmart in 1962, and the company grew into the largest retailer on earth, making Sam, for a time, the world’s richest man. Alice and her mother spent family camping trips painting watercolors of mountains and creeks. “Strictly amateur,” says Alice, 71, sitting in a conference room in the Crystal Bridges library on an August afternoon, “but it was that connection that really started it all.”
“And then I thought, What could I do that would really make a difference in this part of the world?” she says. “My mama always said, ‘Give the thing you love the most.’ And other than family, I decided that had to be art—I didn’t think they wanted my horses,” the retired champion cutting rider says with a chuckle.
Today Walton’s look seems to mimic the institution of which she is so proud. Her cropped silver hair curves under her chin like the armadillo shells of the bridges, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, that straddle two spring-fed ponds at Crystal Bridges. The museum is in a forest, and Walton’s ensemble matches the palette of sycamores, oaks, and dogwoods that surround it. “To me, nature and art are one and the same in many ways. I didn’t want it out on the interstate, I wanted it to be really a part of the community,” she says, explaining why the museum entrance is a 10-minute walk from downtown Bentonville along shaded trails, the approach inspired by Walton’s morning walks in Central Park with her dog Good Friday.
The only deviation from Walton’s forest color scheme is her shoes—ballet-pink sneaker slip-ons covered in rhinestones (“I like shiny shoes!”) and Frank Lloyd Wright geometric print knee socks from the Crystal Bridges giftshop. Her jewelry is a tour of the world’s second-richest woman’s lack of pretension. A strand of gray-green river mussel pearls is a gift from a former neighbor in Fort Worth, Texas; an “all scratched up” peridot hovers over her middle finger, bought “many moons ago somewhere in New York,” and matches the green stones in her costume earrings. Asked who made her crisp, pine-colored blazer, she shrugs and invites the Art Bridges publicist to check the label.
“It’s Armani,” he says. “It’s a-what?” Walton crows in her Arkansas alto. She buys what she likes; she does not know brands, nor does she care. This is and isn’t true of her art; she buys what she likes, but she also knows exactly what she’s getting.
The first piece of art Walton ever purchased was a print of Picasso’s Blue Nude from her father’s store when she was about 10 years old. It cost 25 cents, five weeks’ allowance. Her first museum-quality purchase was a pair of Winslow Homer watercolors in the late 1980s. “When I realized what the prices were, I said, ‘Well, I think I’m going to learn what I’m doing here.’ Because I never had any art courses of any kind. I was a finance major” (she pronounces it fih-nance, with an enthusiastic emphasis on the second syllable). Walton studied at Trinity University in San Antonio and, after a brief spell as a children’s wear buyer for Walmart, became an equity analyst. She set about teaching herself art history.
She says she never considered collecting anything but American art. “When I started reading art books, you get this view of history that covers all the critical issues of each period. And you don’t get that in a history book. I call it history in 3D.” She says she collected only in areas in which she felt she had built some expertise. “We have one of the best collections of women artists,” Walton says proudly, “for the simple reason that they were ridiculously under valued. And I always like value. And the great thing is, now the prices have gone way up for women artists [and] artists of color. I’m so happy about all of that.”
Walton moved back to Bentonville full-time at the beginning of 2020, having sold her Texas horse ranch after being advised by her doctor that she had to choose between riding and walking. (“I said that’s a pretty easy choice!”) She walks around 7,000 steps a day, clocked on her steel Oura ring, and does an hour of hot yoga in the morning. She walks to the museum most days, and when it’s too hot she drives a street-legal golf cart.
She lives in a valley outside town, near her brother Jim and his wife Lynne, as well as their son Tom and his family, and she has been known to drop off produce for her relatives. “She’s very proud of her vegetable garden,” says Olivia, Tom’s wife.
“When I met Tom, I was amazed at how Alice considers her nieces and nephews her children, and I’ve been lucky to benefit from that,” says Olivia, who is on the board of Crystal Bridges and is chair of the Momentary, a 63,000-square-foot satellite space for contemporary art and performance in downtown Bentonville. (Alice was married twice, briefly, in her twenties but has no children.)
Alice and Olivia often go “arting” together, as Alice puts it, though Olivia describes attending art fairs with Alice as “like walking around the stadium with LeBron.” The same could be said about strolling with her through downtown Bentonville. “It’s fun to walk around with her,” Olivia says. “People do recognize her, and I think there’s an appreciation for what she’s given to the town.”
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Crystal Bridges as we know it wasn’t inevitable. The land on which the museum sits had been purchased piecemeal by the Waltons (some parcels had been owned by the family doctor), and Alice’s siblings carefully weighed what she was proposing. “There were a lot of raised eyebrows: ‘You want to do what?’ We really went through it for a couple of years,” Alice says.
But a decade later, Alice says, “art has become a part of everybody’s life.” So, do her family members take her advice when it comes to collecting? “Oh, they wouldn’t listen to me,” Alice says. “You know how brothers are!” Her eldest brother, Rob, is also based in Arkansas, and grandchildren are dispersed throughout the country, but “everybody comes back a lot,” Alice says, for events like the annual family camping weekend and a county persimmon seed–spitting contest.
In his 1992 autobiography, Made in America, Sam Walton wrote of his only daughter, “She’s the most like me—a maverick—but even more volatile than I am.” Asked about this, Alice is quiet for a moment. “I was amazed when he said that. I guess I’m a bit of a dreamer, and he was too. When I think about things, I think about what you could do to make them better, and I suspect that’s what he meant.” She fingers her necklace. “But I think mainly it’s about dreaming, how you can change systems. My intention certainly wasn’t to do that in the art world, but I do think we’ve had a positive impact. I think people are much more cognizant of the fact that everybody deserves art.”
It is this priority that she returns to when asked about the criticism that she had denuded East Coast institutions of prized works of art to fill what has been described as a vanity project in the middle of nowhere. In 2005, when Walton (who is not involved with Walmart and has never been a board member) purchased Asher B. Durand’s iconic Hudson River School painting Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library for $35 million, the New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman called it a “sad day…when New Yorkers lost one of the city’s cultural treasures,” and Rebecca Solnit wrote in the Nation, “Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering, a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways.” She continued, “Durand’s painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Walmart has been savaging.”
Regarding the origin of the museum’s endowment, the artist Hank Willis Thomas (who is also a Crystal Bridges board member) asks, “Is there a museum where that’s not the case? I can’t think of a scenario where that would not apply, and those complexities are at the core of our nation. None of us chooses our family, and the complexity of that legacy is something I do not envy.”
In the decade since Crystal Bridges opened, it has had 5.6 million visitors, largely thanks to a Walmart Foundation gift that ensures free admission in perpetuity. “I knew we needed it,” Walton says as she strolls through the North Bridge Gallery of the museum. “I didn’t know how bad it would be wanted. We were hoping for 150,000 people a year, and instead it’s been 700,000.”
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For a tour of Crystal Bridges, Walton slips on a glimmering silver snake print mask, a gift from her cousin Sybil. “Isn’t it great?” she says. “You’ve got to have a little fun!” In the portrait gallery a seven-foot-tall John Trumbull painting of Alexander Hamilton dominates one wall. “This is actually my boyfriend,” Walton says with a wink. “He has always been since I was a finance major.” (“I loved the musical,” she says, but “I’ve read all the books, so I will tell you they took license.”) She spent 10 years trying to acquire the painting from Credit Suisse, but “there was a lady on the Met board raising hell.” Walton suggested the two institutions share the painting, so Credit Suisse donated it to both museums, and now it shuttles to and from the East Coast. “It’s a great answer for one of the great American paintings of one of our great heroes.”
Willis Thomas, whose own survey show traveled from the Portland Museum to Crystal Bridges in 2020, says, “It’s exciting to see how Alice has made an attempt to do a course correction, by telling American history through the objects and works and thinking about contextualization and the different ways we can tell the American story that doesn’t try to whitewash things.”
Walton pauses in front of an intricately beaded Ojibwe bandolier bag. “Isn’t that wonderful?” she says. “The reason for the expansion is so we can handle crafts and Native American stories appropriately. It’s not the American story without it.”
One thing the expansion will not increase is storage space. “When we were planning the building, I cut the storage in half,” Walton says of the original Crystal Bridges plans. “I said if it’s not on our walls it better be on somebody’s.” This is the impetus behind Art Bridges, which, in addition to sharing the collection, provides financial, curatorial, and logistical support to smaller institutions. In May 2021 the foundation loaned Eldzier Cortor’s Southern Souvenir No. II to the Delaware Art Museum and also funded a virtual dance residency inspired by the painting.
“Crystal Bridges is of a place—it is of northwest Arkansas,” says Art Bridges CEO Paul Provost. “Art Bridges is a national mission. In the same way [Alice has] provided access to great works in northwest Arkansas, Art Bridges will do that very thing around the nation.” He notes that the organization currently has projects underway in almost every state.
Walton says Art Bridges grew out of Crystal Bridges’ mission and her lack of access to art when she was a child. “Art Bridges is exactly what Crystal Bridges was all about, and that is giving access to art that people in rural, smaller parts of the country don’t have,” she says, adding that it will also partner with major urban museums, like LACMA, to help them reach underserved urban areas.
“Art shouldn’t be in a basement,” Walton says, the glimmer in her hazel eyes matching the snake scales of her mask. “I thought about it long and hard before I ever decided to try to define art—and I define it as the space between, because paint on a canvas is not art if there’s not a viewer. It’s the interaction that creates art.”
DigiDame 