It Happened Last Week

Turning Green

By Mark Adams
Published May 21, 2007

It was a spring week in which green was bursting out all over. Mayor Bloomberg hosted a global environmental sleepover; Bill Clinton, sounding more Gore-like every day, came down from Harlem to tout the mayor’s congestion-pricing plan. Rudy Giuliani revealed that he’s earned $17 million since last year and picked up bonus 9/11 hero points by tearing into a fellow Republican debater who suggested that the U.S. in some way invited the attacks. Jerry Falwell, who blamed the towers’ fall on Gotham’s immoral minority, passed on to a better place. The NYPD released a list of troublemakers under surveillance prior to the 2004 convention, including Alicia Keys and L.L. Cool J. A new poll voted Police Commissioner Ray Kelly most likely to be elected mayor in 2009. Opie and Anthony took a month off (with pay) after saying impure things about Condoleezza Rice and Queen Elizabeth II. Jersey was burning after a flare dropped from an F-16 fighter scorched thousands of acres. Jurors learned of faux fireman Peter Braunstein’s fantasy to kill real-fur lover Anna Wintour for not returning calls during his days as a journalist. (“All the while I’m thinking, ‘Who is this skank?’ ” he’d confided to his diary.) Peacemaker Bono quibbled with parachute-panted eighties axman Billy Squier over suspicious carbon emissions at the San Remo. A pair of perfume millionaires on Long Island were busted for enslaving their housekeepers; on her Friendster page, their daughter named Human Trafficking as one of her favorite movies. The Plaza’s new owners planned a cheesy-sounding $5 billion replica of Eloises’s haunt in Vegas. Proud Dutchmen rolled a 1,300-pound wheel of Gouda into Grand Central. City cops wheeled around Manhattan’s streets on Segways. Former forbidden Long Island lovers Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco reunited for a TV-ready “date.” And Spring Awakening, the adaptation of a nineteenth-century German play (by way of the 1980 classic Little Darlings), snagged a Broadway-best eleven Tony nominations.