Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll find out about a new job for a former deputy mayor in a seemingly unusual place. We’ll also get details on corporate sponsors that have cut back their support of New York City’s annual Pride festivities.
For a former top official under Mayor Eric Adams, there is life after City Hall. In a cemetery.
Meera Joshi, who quit her role as deputy mayor for operations in February over Adams’s cooperation with President Trump, is being named president of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where more than 570,000 people are buried.
“These jumps are never completely predictable or planned,” said Joshi, who was the chairwoman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for five years under Mayor Bill de Blasio after working as deputy commissioner and general counsel under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“I got a call from the appointments office under Bloomberg” about becoming general counsel, she recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t even take taxis — are you sure?’ They said, ‘You’ll be fine.’ And I ended up being the chair of that agency.”
She explained that she had told that story to illustrate that management skills could transcend different subject areas. “What may not be obvious at first when you think about Green-Wood,” she said, “is there are an incredible number of parallels to running the city’s operations, albeit on a smaller scale.”
Green-Wood, whose 478 acres make it 60 percent of the size of Central Park, has become more than the final resting place for the likes of the publisher Horace Greeley, the piano maker William Steinway, the conductor Leonard Bernstein and the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. It has added educational and cultural programming that has drawn in people who are not mourning the loss of a loved one. And Peter Davidson, the board chairman, said that Green-Wood had “a bunch of old systems that you want to bring up to speed.”
“We are a huge chunk of green space,” he said. “We have beautiful monuments. We have roads. We have sewers. We have overflow-of-water issues.” To bring in “a real government policy insider is just super, super helpful.” As the deputy mayor for operations, Joshi oversaw the Parks Department; the Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the city’s sewer system; and the Department of Transportation, which builds and maintains the streets.
Joshi resigned at the same time as Maria Torres-Springer, who had been the first deputy mayor, and two other deputy mayors who had overseen much of city government. Their departures came after the Justice Department moved to dismiss Adams’s corruption case in apparent exchange for his help with the president’s crackdown on immigration.
Joshi arrives as Green-Wood is approaching the completion of a welcome center built to hug a Victorian-style greenhouse across from the main entrance. The greenhouse had been “lovingly cared for,” the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission said in 1982, but by the time Green-Wood bought it in 2012, it had deteriorated and had to be stabilized.
“I live in that neighborhood,” Joshi said, “so I’ve walked past the rundown Weir Greenhouse,” as it is known, as well as the barricaded site after construction scaffolding went up.
Joshi will succeed Richard Moylan, who is retiring after spending his entire career at Green-Wood, starting as a grass cutter when he was in law school in the 1970s. But his connections run deeper: His father and grandfather were contractors who installed, cleaned and restored monuments at Green-Wood, and his father was buried there in 1982. His mother was also buried there when she died in 1995.
Moylan had announced his retirement plans last year, and Davidson said Green-Wood had hired a search firm that brought Joshi to Green-Wood’s attention. But it turned out that she was already familiar with Green-Wood. She had been taking walks there.
“Green-Wood is surrounded by a gate, so there is a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them,’” she said, adding that she would “work on how we break that down so as many people as possible can take advantage of the beauty.”
Founded in 1838, Green-Wood was second only to Niagara Falls among tourist attractions in New York State by the 1860s. It gives tours, like one of presidential candidates who didn’t win and who are buried there. Last month it played host to a day of family-oriented “nature adventures,” with a bird-and-bug expedition and a flora-and-fauna walk. And it has become a place for first-date picnics.
“We’re going back to the 19th century with cemeteries — they’re now places to go to do things,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University and a former director of the Rudin Center for Transportation; she was a visiting scholar there. “They’re being discovered because they’re part of the urban fabric, great open space, and they’re not noisy.” He added, “The future of cemeteries is weaving them back into the city’s life.”
Weather
Expect a rainy and windy day with a high temperature around 56. In the evening, chance of rain lowers to 40 percent, and the temperature will dip to just below 50.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Memorial Day (Monday).
The latest Metro news
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Will a federal investigation help or hurt Cuomo? Democrats’ distrust of the Justice Department under President Trump is so intense that even some of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s critics said an investigation of decisions he made during the pandemic might not hurt his campaign, and might even help it.
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Graduates boo Columbia’s president: Amid the Trump administration’s clampdown on international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism, Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, delivered remarks in which she noted the absence of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate who continues to be detained by immigration authorities.
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Tug of war over land: The mayor of Toms River, N.J., is poised to use eminent domain to raze an Episcopal church and build a park with pickleball courts, even though the church had wanted to set up a 17-bed shelter. Opponents of the park plan see it as a thinly disguised way to block the shelter.
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Sentenced for luring gay-bar robbery victims to their deaths: Two men convicted of two murders in what prosecutors called a “deadly hustle” in Manhattan were sentenced to 40 years to life in prison. A third man, who was involved in only one murder, received a sentence of 20 years to life.
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An artist walked into a bar: Hans Noë, an architect and sculptor whose most visible role in New York City was as an accidental restaurateur, reviving the famed Fanelli Cafe in SoHo in the 1970s, died at 96.
A pullback from supporting Pride
About 25 percent of corporate donors to New York City’s annual Pride festivities have canceled or scaled back their support, citing economic uncertainty and fear of retribution from the Trump administration.
My colleague Liam Stack writes that the retreat of sponsors like Mastercard, Nissan and Garnier follows years of wavering support from companies for L.G.B.T.Q. causes. That has left Heritage of Pride, which produces the Pride celebration, facing a shortfall estimated at $750,000, an unexpected worry for an organization whose spending has outstripped its income every year since 2019, when it hosted WorldPride, a larger international L.G.T.B.Q. gathering that had not taken place in the United States before.
Heritage of Pride has now announced a grass-roots fund-raising appeal in a bid to “keep N.Y.C. Pride events free and accessible for all.” It said it hoped to raise $25,000 by the end of June.
Almost all the major donors to last year’s celebration have pulled back. A spokesman for Heritage of Pride said that the shortfall may force the downsizing or cancellation of some events next month or of other initiatives, such as a community grant program that channels money to smaller L.G.B.T.Q. groups in New York.
Corporate representatives have been guarded when discussing the political environment, said the spokesman, Kevin Kilbride, “but some folks have definitely mentioned the fear of potential blowback from the Trump administration if you are a big corporation and you are publicly supporting D.E.I. initiatives.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Bow Tied
Dear Diary:
I was riding the Q from Manhattan to Brooklyn on a Saturday afternoon. A man and a woman who were very dressed up were sitting across from me.
She was in a cocktail dress, and he was wearing a tuxedo. They were on their way to a fund-raising event for Prospect Park. She was trying to tie her partner’s bow tie but kept failing.
As we approached the Manhattan Bridge, another man offered the woman his phone. He had found a video showing how to tie a bow tie.
The woman followed the instructions on the video with some help from riders sitting nearby, and, voilà, the tie was perfect.
Everyone who been following the events smiled and clapped. Then another man took a picture of the perfectly tied bow tie so the man in the tuxedo could see it, too.
— Flo Rubinson
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post Goodbye, City Hall. Hello, Green-Wood Cemetery. appeared first on New York Times.
