Good morning. It’s Tuesday. We’re in for extreme cold for at least the next week as we continue to dig out from the weekend’s storm. But first, we’ll find out why Benjamin Franklin is in the public eye right now. And we’ll get details on a new poll that found that concerns about affordability were driving economic anxieties.
Benjamin Franklin — author, inventor, publisher, scientist and diplomat — seems to be having a moment.
He has become the face of the New York Lottery in television commercials and subway advertisements for Xtra Multiplier scratch-offs. And a letter he didn’t even write is expected to sell for a lot of Benjamins today. The presale estimate at Sotheby’s is $1 million to $1.5 million. The letter, from George Washington, was addressed to Franklin when he was the American emissary to France.
The lottery campaign plays off the idea that “everyone understands ‘Benjamins’ as a term for money,” said Cuanan Cronwright, the executive director of McCann New York, the agency that worked on the promotion. Franklin and money had a history before the federal government put his face on the $100 bill, in 1914: He printed paper currency himself almost 200 years earlier, before there was a federal government.
The commercials dramatize the scale of the potential winnings by using Franklin look-alikes as “a really quick, funny visual” that has more appeal than a straight read by an announcer, Cronwright said. The commercials follow an Xtra Multiplier scratch-off winner as she goes through everyday routines. She is trailed by the look-alikes as she orders a latte in a coffee shop, works out in a trampoline class and lounges on a beach. The Franklin look-alikes tag along in their frock coats and knee breeches.
But why Franklin?
“Benjamin Franklin is such a known figure,” Cronwright said — described in biographies and a Ken Burns documentary and portrayed by Michael Douglas in an Apple TV series. “He’s got the status,” Cronwright said.
Jay Snider, the collector who is selling the Washington letter to Franklin, said that Franklin was “beloved both consciously and subconsciously.”
A roomful of Benjamins
For the casting call for the commercials, “there must have been 50 or 60 people who came in,” Cronwright said, adding, “Having a roomful of that many Benjamin Franklin impersonators was hilarious to start with.”
It was also helpful: “We didn’t have to coach them into the role.”
The letter to Franklin was written to introduce him to the Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who had served with distinction on Washington’s military staff during the Revolutionary War.
Selby Kiffer, a senior vice president of Sotheby’s, said that Washington and Lafayette “really had a father-son relationship, which comes through in this letter.”
“This is not the standard letter of introduction that he might have written for someone else,” he added.
Washington wrote that Lafayette was “brilliant” and had “Zeal, Military ardour & talents” that had “endeared him to America.”
But Franklin and Lafayette had never met. Kiffer said their ships might have crossed paths when Lafayette sailed to the colonies “before there was an official Franco-American alliance” at the same time that Franklin was on the way to Paris “to try to make that alliance a reality” in 1777. The letter dates from a year later, when Lafayette was granted leave to return to France, with the understanding that he would return to the colonies.
He did, in 1781, and played an important role in the last major battle of the Revolutionary War, at Yorktown.
Snider said he was parting with the letter because “I’m just at a stage of life.” He is 68 and moving to Miami. “I could keep collecting,” he said, “but my wife and I decided that it’s time to lighten up on stuff, spend more time with grandchildren, travel more and not move the whole collection.”
Weather
Today, expect increasing clouds and a chance of flurries with temperatures near 21 degrees. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 11.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended for snow removal.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“She’s able to navigate difficult political terrain, and, in fact, she isn’t afraid to dive into thorny issues. She knows that is, in part, what universities are meant to do.” — Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia University, on Jennifer Mnookin, who has been chosen as Columbia’s next president. Dr. Mnookin is currently the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The latest Metro news
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Racing to help homeless people: The storm over the weekend underscored how vulnerable people are when they don’t have a safe place to live. At least eight people have died since Friday evening, including several who Mayor Zohran Mamdani said had “interactions with the shelter system” in the past.
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Mamdani’s first big management test: Mamdani, employing the same communication skills that won him the mayoralty, blanketed the airwaves with updates during the storm.
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Another snowy weekend? After a computer model hinted that a classic nor’easter could strike the East Coast this coming weekend, rumors flew online. Judson Jones, a meteorologist who covers extreme weather for The New York Times, says not to believe the hype — yet.
Other news
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Missing his nurses: Pedro, a 2-year-old in need of a new heart, played peekaboo with the nurses who cared for him for months. Now they’re on the picket line, replacement nurses are looking after him, and no one rushes over anymore when he pretends to hide.
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Stolen cars: Officials said that a theft ring swapped or cloned key fobs to steal high-end models from dealerships in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.
Affordability worries
Mayor Zohran Mamdani made affordability a central issue in the campaign that carried him into City Hall. Now a New York Times/Siena poll says that Americans worry that they can no longer afford a middle-class lifestyle.
A majority of the people questioned in the nationwide poll said that they could cover basics like rent, gas and groceries. But most of them said they were worried about how much it all costs. That’s an everyday concern in New York, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Over the weekend, my colleague Eliza Shapiro kicked off a series on affordability in New York with a profile of Kerry McAuliffe, whose family of five lives on $140,000 a year.
The rent on their three-bedroom apartment in Morningside Heights is $2,700 a month, but they get a discount: McAuliffe’s husband works as the superintendent for their building and the one next door. That job adds $30,000 to their budget, supplementing what he makes as an M.R.I. technician at Columbia’s medical center. McAuliffe left her job in education because child care would have canceled out her paycheck.
They try to avoid expensive excursions to places like the Museum of Ice Cream, which can cost $50 a person — even though the kids would love to go.
METROPOLITAN diary
Happy New Year!
Dear Diary:
It was New Year’s Eve 1998. A friend was having a party at a loft in Chelsea. I was single. At 12:05, I sneaked out to walk home alone. I still had a bottle of champagne in my bag.
Two friends were leaving at the same time. As we walked down the block, I looked up and saw what appeared to be a giant party in a loft.
As we stared up at the party, a stranger comes barreling outside and asked us what we were doing. We stared up again and then decided to go to the party.
We got buzzed in, and when the door to the loft opened we held out the bottle of champagne and yelled, “Happy New Year!”
It turned out to be a music executive’s dinner party, with family members and dogs and all kind of musicians.
Our little group proceeded to become the life of the party. One of my friends danced with Grandma and a dog.
Finally, at about 2 a.m., as I stared into the refrigerator, the loft’s owner asked me who had invited us.
I quickly made an excuse, rounded up the others and off we went into the night.
Best New Year’s Eve ever!
— Debra Schutt
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson 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 Benjamin Franklin Is the Man of the Moment appeared first on New York Times.
